JOHN ELLIS
One Foot In the Swamp

Hyena

Saxophonist John Ellis is widely known as the traveling companion of Charlie Hunter, but the musical connections on One Foot In the Swamp don’t stop there. The CD is rife with musical associations and echoes of the two cities most associated with Ellis, New Orleans and New York City. Nicholas Payton is here for six of the CD's eleven tracks, and drummer Jason Marsalis is featured throughout. Coming in to offer some Yankee grooves are guitarist John Scofield and pianist Aaron Goldberg. Goldberg is perhaps most recently known for his stint with Joshua Redman, and here he plays only Fender Rhodes or Wurlitzer electric pianos. Harmonica player Gregoire Maret will be familiar to fans of Hunter’s Right Now Move CD, and acoustic bassist Roland Guerin has had a longstanding gig playing with pianist Marcus Roberts.

So it comes as no surprise that Ellis’ new release offers some of the requisitie jam band elements but offers many other delights as well. There’s some stomping second line influenced stuff and some outright funk, but its balanced with a sophisticated, modern jazz sensibility that adds so much flavor and texture to the mix that it lifts this release far above the ordinary. The first track, after a very brief electronic introduction, is a groove jam entitled “Happy,” but it manages to evoke the effortless urban funk of Cannonball Adderley and Joe Zawinul, providing a happy listening moment indeed. But compare that to the incredible “Work In Progress.” The piece begins breezily with Maret’s harmonica introduction followed by a post-bop trio jam with Guerin, Marsalis, and Goldberg getting into a bluesy groove that dissolves into a rapid fire hard bop number. Ellis takes a lengthy soprano solo that grows ever more frenetic before the piece is deconstructed by the rhythm section followed by two different frontlines (Ellis/Payton and Ellis/Maret) taking it home. You aren’t going to hear music like this on the jam band circuit.

Likewise the gentle “Country Girls,” a pastoral gem that blends Maret’s harmonica and Ellis’ tenor, underpinned by Goldberg’s Wurlitzer punctuation and some tasteful brushwork by Marsalis. As brief and pretty as a pop tune, it’s over long before you want it to be. On “Bonus Round” Ellis deploys an unusual tonal color, combining bass clarinet, flugelhorn, and harmonica. “Seeing Mice,” at the center of the album, is a free jam, really, with Marsalis playing in a Paul Motian mode, while Payton, Ellis, and Maret careen and collide over a background wash of sound created by Goldberg. The piece hangs together like delicate curls of smoke, contstantly threatening to collapse yet somehow suggesting a structure that is never quite define. Payton, who explored this and many other territories on last year’s Sonic Trance CD, is right at home here and when he’s playing the listener’s attention never wanders.

Ellis’ modern classic “One For the Kelpers” brings Scofield back into play in territory familiar to the guitarist from his Uberjam and Up All Night CDs. The rendition here is somewhat more langorous than that Ellis recorded with Hunter on the recent Friends Seen and Unseen. “Ostinato” is like some long lost Herbie Hancock track, delicate and full of interesting tonal color. Rounding out One Foot In the Swamp is the lengthy jazz jam “Chalmette Sawarma” and two traditional songs that Ellis learned from his grandparents. “Michael Finnegan” is given a free time treatment that contrasts nicely with the song’s circular structure. The finale, “Sippin’ Cider” is pure New Orleans street parade, and is a great conclusion to the album’s balancing act between down home blues peppered with gospel influenced roots music and sophisticated, downtown jazz.

This CD is an excellent listen that, unlike many groove-based projects, continues to offer deeper pleasures the more it is heard. In conjunction with the recent albums of those who play on it—Payton’s Sonic Trance, Scofield’s Uberjam, Marsalis’ Music In Motion,--and recent releases by musicians Ellis has worked with such as Charlie Hunter and Stanton Moore, it would seem that electric jazz and fusion are having their revenge on those who shut these styles out of the jazz mainstream. Picking up where their influences left off many years ago, these musicians are creating quality music that, while respectful of the jazz tradition, are not bound by the conventions of the past.